When Toy Story exploded onto movie screens in the 1995 holiday
season, the Disney folks weren't the only ones holding their breath and keeping
an eye on box office numbers. In a nondescript office building in downtown
Vancouver, British Columbia, a few expatriate Brits were trying to decide if
they should greet the film's success with cheers or reservation. Toy
Story is hard not to like, especially if you're a fan of state-of-the-art
computer-generated animation. These men were more than just fans; they were
veterans. Almost a decade earlier, Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair had animated and
directed a milestone of the genre: Dire Straits' Money for Nothing
video. Despite the video's boxy, stiff-limbed characters - an artifact of the
limited computing power of the day - Money for Nothing pushed the vernal
art form of CGI (computer-generated imagery) further into the cultural
consciousness than anything before it. It gave Pearson and Blair, along with
fellow animator Phil Mitchell, who joined the team a few years after the Dire
Straits video, the impetus to consider doing something far more ambitious. Soon
they were kicking around ideas for making the first television animation series
made entirely with computers.

After much creative stewing and an arduous search for investors, the result,
a children's TV series called ReBoot, débuted on North American
screens in 1994 - beating Toy Story by a good year. Still,
in terms of exposure, John Lasseter's film easily stole ReBoot's thunder
- which turns out to be something of a sore spot for the British team. They've
nothing bad to say about the film. On the contrary: it was good; it was a
success; and what's good for computer animation is good for them too. But
talking to any one of the three creators will likely bring out a casual mention
of this feat: just one season of ReBoot episodes - 16 shows - means
producing almost 320 minutes of CGI. "Compare that with the maybe 10 minutes of
CGI in Jurassic Park," says Phil Mitchell. "Or with Toy Story,
which runs about 80 minutes. That movie took years to do, too. We can now do
two episodes in under six weeks."

But as long as animation is not an Olympic sport, it hardly matters who crosses
the finish line first. Quality is what matters. And in this category,
ReBoot and Toy Story are in the same league. While no one would
mistake ReBoot's story lines and dialogs for the work of David Mamet,
they're humorous and entertaining - and the result of a propellerhead
sensibility that can make the show exasperating to watch for anyone who doesn't
happen to think that computers are way cool. ReBoot is a 3-D
roller-coaster ride unlike anything that's been shown on TV before - with this
quality and in this quantity. There's plenty of fast-paced action, dizzying
camera angles, and other eye candy to keep kids riveted.

"I think what they do is enormously impressive," says Jim Ludtke, the
cutting-edge animator who is responsible for The Residents' Freak Show
CD-ROM, as well as a new title based on the old Tales fromthe
Crypt comic books. "For me, it's about the same jump in quality and
sophistication that you get when you've been watching Hanna-Barbera cartoons
like The Huckleberry Hound Show, and then you see Astro Boy or
Speed Racer for the first time. There's a richness to ReBoot's
images and a variety in the facial articulation of the characters that's just a
step ahead. I frequently say, 'How'd they do that?'"

The fact that ReBoot is made entirely on computers (cratefuls of
high-end Silicon Graphics workstations) is not really what sets the show apart.
Nowadays, most of the traditional-looking animation shows leave the tedious
task of inking and coloring to computers. Often, animators draw images
digitally, using an electronic tablet and stylus - eliminating paper or acetate
cels entirely. So what distinguishes ReBoot? It's the lifelike 3-D
effects, obtained with obvious animation talent and gobs of raw processing
power. And ReBoot's type of computer animation yields creative and
production advantages that nothing else can match. "If a traditional animator
draws a scene and then decides that a different angle is called for - or three
different angles - he has to start all over again," cocreator Blair points out.
"But on a high-end workstation running Softimage, you just go click-click-click
and you have your three new
angles."